In Oil & Companies News 15/05/2015
Angola produced 158.9 million barrels of oil in the first quarter of 2015, or 1.76 million barrels per day, indicates a report from the Angolan Petroleum Ministry released in Luanda.
The report specifies that production level fluctuations in the first three months of the year were “due to operational reasons.”
The most recent Angolan government forecast set out in the proposed revision of the 2015 state budget indicates total production of 669 million barrels of oil this year, up 10 percent over 2014, equivalent to more than 1.8 million barrels per day.
During the same three-month period Angola imported 1.1753 million tons of fuel, or nearly 40 percent of needs for derivative products such as petrol and diesel, due to the country’s low refining capacity.
The Luanda refinery processed 574,400 tons of crude oil from January thru March, nearly a fifth of the country’s needs.
The national refinery on the outskirts of Luanda was built in 1955 and operates at nearly 70 percent capacity. An IMF report analysing the fuel sector in Angola indicated that it was “very inefficient”, with production costs “generally higher than those of imported fuel.”
In December 2012 Angola began building a new refinery in Lobito with double the capacity of the current refinery. Plans call for operations to begin there in 2017.
